“Would you like me to get the papers out of the car, sir?”
“We won’t need them,” said Mr. Moreton. “I know what’s in that box as well as I know my own name. Did you read that little book Hans Schnieder wrote for his children?”
“Yes.”
“What did you think of it?”
George smiled. “After reading it I made a resolution. If I have children, I’m never going to tell them a thing about my war experiences.”
The old man chuckled. “They’ll get it out of you. The thing you want to watch out for is having a drip of a son like Hans who writes down what you say. That’s dangerous.”
“How do you mean?”
“I’ll tell you. I was administrator all right, but I went to Germany because my partners sent me. Tail wagging the dog. The case had been in our hair too long and they wanted to have done with it. My instructions were to confirm what we already believed-that there was no legitimate heir to the estate. Well, when I found that Hans was probably a son of Franz Schneider’s first marriage, I had to know about that marriage in order to complete the picture. As you know, I went to Potsdam to see if I could trace him through the regimental archives. To begin with, I failed.”
“But next day you went back for another check through.”
“Yes, but I’d had a night to think. And I’d thought again about what Hans had written. If there was any truth in the thing at all, Sergeant Schneider had become a casualty at the Battle of Eylau and been lost in the retreat. Surely the war diary would record that fact in a casualty list. So that next day, instead of going all over the nominal rolls again, I got the interpreter to translate the regimental account of the battle for me.” He sighed reminiscently. “There are some moments in life, my boy, that always feel good no matter how many times you go over them again in your mind. That was one of them. It was late in the morning and getting very warm. The interpreter was having trouble with that old writing and was stumbling over the translation of it. Then he began on the account of the long march from Eylau to Insterburg. I was only half listening. As a matter of fact, I was thinking about a bad march I’d done in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. And then something the interpreter had said made me jump right out of my skin.”